written in water

Sunday, October 28, 2018

The kind of novel that circles around one character, who’s a
bit weird, whose lifestyle is strange. They find it difficult to talk to
people, they have odd habits, they’re tortured by something – Some Terrible Thing
– in their past. The entire novel is asking: What was that thing?

The character is either lying about it, or not too sure
themselves, because trauma, so the book slowly and gradually – very slowly and
very gradually - discloses the Truth about that character: the terrible Thing
that happened to them, the terrible Thing they did, what their damage is, their
secret. The problem with this is that it narrows story and character down to a
puzzle, and reading the book starts to feel like nothing more interesting, nothing richer or more surprising than solving the
puzzle. The author, meanwhile, is much too present, getting in the way, looming
over the whole enterprise, smugly slipping in one would-be tantalising clue after
another, every fifty pages or so. The author is like a weird waiter in a
restaurant who brings you your meal one morsel at a time. It gets frustrating. I
can usually guess what the secret is, but even if I can’t, I tend to lose
interest. If I want a puzzle, I’ll do a jigsaw, or a sudoku.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

The only thing I remember from the first trailer was this little
robot that looked like a dustbin falling over with a clang. The whole cinema
laughed. We thought it was ridiculous. I’ve just seen it again online and
there’s a horrible voice-over too.

So I sat down to watch it in 1977, 13 or 14 years old,
without high hopes. And then it performed that trick that cinema sometimes does.
Star Wars reached out of the screen, wrapped a hand round me, and pulled me
into its world. I was immersed, taken through time unaware, with a big, goofy
smile on my face. I already liked science fiction – Arthur C Clarke, Ursula Le
Guin, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Philip K Dick – but this was something else.
It was science fiction and romance and a Western and cliff-hangers and jokes
and pure escapism and shiny chrome and lasers and mammoth spaceships. To a boy
sitting in the shabby Lewisham Odeon, in the seventies, the beige decade, it
was joy. It was pure magic.

The thrum of fantasy, adventure and possibility was always
there after that. The buzz of a light sabre, the breathing of Darth Vader, that
sense of the endless well of space existing around us. It has been with me,
always.

So I saw Empire with my mate Phil in London one evening a
couple of years later. Then a mini marathon of all three films when they
premiered ROTJ. Then the prequels, which had their moments, and now we live
with constant Star Wars and the magic’s a bit diluted.

But it’s still there. The music puts that goofy smile back
on my face. That sense of fantastic stories within reach, of possibility, existing
under the skin of ordinary life. Still there.

Friday, December 15, 2017

That’s Swing Time the novel by Zadie Smith, not the film
from the 30’s. I’m halfway through and admiring it – the detail and texture,
the character work, the sense that these feel like lives that were
actually lived - but I’m also getting a little bit bored. Why am I getting
bored? It’s partly the style. It’s the kind of style people call austere and
lucid, but you might also call plain or ordinary. The main problem though, so
far at least, is that Smith forgets, or can’t quite be bothered, to include a
decent story. There’s a bit of a hook in the opening pages, the main
character’s been disgraced somehow and we’re going to find out how, eventually,
but it’s not really enough to keep me engaged and interested. I mean I am
interested, sort of, but not very. (I used to review books for the TLS, The
Spectator and the radio – you wouldn’t know it from that last sentence.)

It’s all a bit Elena Ferrante of course, but I found My
Brilliant Friend a lot more involving. More intimate somehow, perhaps even more
felt. The main character in Swing Time drifts along observing things and
generally feeling a bit sad. I had a much more vivid sense of struggle and
ambition, of joy being grabbed when it’s available, from MBF.

Anyway, only halfway through. I’ll certainly finish it. But
I may pause to read a short story or two by Tom Franklin (from the collection
Poachers), just for a refreshing shot of narrative punch and stylistic flourish.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

There’s something about a Reacher novel. That guy walking
across America, hitching, catching busses, drinking coffee in diners, never
washing his clothes, just buying new ones, encountering small towns run by bad
men, incompetent cops and over-confident tough guys. He goes into these mean towns
and isn’t himself mean. He uses his fists mostly, and elbows, and his simple
moral code, but he’ll pick up a gun if he needs it. He’s definitely not Tom
Cruise. He’s a young Clint Eastwood, or maybe Robert Mitchum. Who is he these
days? I’m not sure Hollywood actually produces men like that any more. Maybe
Matthew McConaughey, if he dialled it down quite a lot.

I read somewhere that Lee Child basically starts a story and
follows his nose, and sometimes it shows. The books can meander. I read one
where there was barely a fight in it and the story wandered around a bit
aimlessly till it ended. Not very satisfying. That gruff, matter-of-fact style
can suddenly look a bit exposed and ordinary if nothing much is happening. If
the momentum of the plot sags, then it can get boring. But mostly they work.
Take a clearly defined character, aim him at trouble, see what happens.

Genre is of course fluid, not clearly defined, but with
these books you know exactly where you are. No character development, no big
themes, nothing interesting going on with the language. Just Jack Reacher,
doing his thing.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Some writers fill the little biographies in
their books with unusual jobs. Something involving funerals and
embalming for instance, (you’re wacky, unconventional), macho pursuits sometimes, (you’re rugged and, probably, gruff), or horny-handed,
man-of-the-people jobs like docker are good for credibility, (you wish
you were James Kelman but, unfortunately, you aren’t.) Tom Franklin, a writer I like a lot, is a good example. His biog says he was a clerk in a hospital morgue, he worked in a grit factory - a grit factory! - and he worked in construction. That's three out of three, right there.

I haven’t had any jobs like those. The nearest I’ve come to
funerals is filing hospital records, the nearest to a macho pursuit is
a paper-round, and the nearest to being a docker is probably also the
paper-round. I’ve done lots of workshops, varieties of teaching, some reviewing, and I’ve done jobs with titles that mean very little
to people who aren’t involved with them. Researcher for Shape London.
Literature Development Worker. Centre Director for The Arvon Foundation. Royal
Literature Fund Fellow.

In my second novel, The Alchemist, my winning and hopeful
but partly doomed young hero, Billy, writes a story in school at the age of
about 8. That’s what I did. I began it in class and continued it at home, and
it finished up, I think, 13 pages long. I felt like I’d written The Lord of the
Rings. I drew a cover for it too, which was probably no worse than some of the
covers my published work has had. (EG the one where a miserable looking bloke glares at potential book-buyers, miserably.) In The Alchemist, Billy goes on
to eat some newsprint, in the hope that this will somehow imbue him with a
writer’s qualities. This whole area is difficult and subjective, but I think I
can safely say that eating newsprint is not how to become a novelist.

Obviously, you have to eat a bit of a novel. Maybe at some
time in the past I ate a bit of the Radio Times and a bit of a screenplay too. Probably
not. But I like the jobs I’ve done. It reminds me of a line from Snow by Louis MacNeice: ‘The drunkenness of things being various.’ To me, that suggests accidentally stumbling from one thing to the next, always surprised, and usually pleased. And that's fine, because I could cope in a morgue, but I don't think I'd do well in a grit factory.

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

The trip to Sweden (see below) arrived out of the blue, but
then so do a lot of things these days. I’m writing an essay on forgetting for
Radio 3. (I might have used that old post called Going, Going, but I forgot
that I’d written it of course.) I’m also pitching to be involved in a new podcast, and I’m
trying to make people aware of the new book with readings, interviews, a
feature in the local paper, library and school visits, festivals. I’m editing
the sequel and writing a new one. Plus working a day a week at York St John and
preparing a couple of workshops.

It’s all a bit different from the days of Emmerdale. Things
didn’t arrive out of the blue so much in those days. Other projects, projects I’m
very proud of like Tender and The Last Word, got fitted in around the edges. There
was a big, dominant presence, and not much room for anything else. Remove the
whale, and a shoal of fish appears. They’re unpredictable, darting around all
over the place, sometimes just a few, sometimes lots of them. They’re
unreliable too, because often they don’t show up at all. But when they do,
look at their interesting colours, their variety. See how they glitter.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

This took some getting in to. An omniscient narrator several
steps back from the action, withholding judgement or emotional involvement, coolly
observing a large cast of characters navigating their often mundane, sometimes
funny and occasionally tragic lives. The book builds a portrait of a community
in fragments, frustratingly slowly at first but gathering power until it
becomes a hypnotic accretion of detail. Nice to find a novel that doesn’t make
it easy for you, doesn’t seem needy, doesn’t seem to care whether you like it
or not. It just gets on with its work, like the weather.

About Me

Yorkshire based, London born, married, two children, I'm a writer of novels, short stories, TV, film and radio. This is a blog about now and then, success and disappointment, books, cancer ... everything really.
@markillis1
markillis.co.uk